In October, the National Hispanic Cultural Center will be honoring the life of Dolores Huerta with an opera simply and appropriately titled Dolores. Composer Nicolás Lell Benavides, who was born in Albuquerque and grew up in the Los Ranchos area, wrote the music for the opera and came up with the original idea, but librettist Marella Martin Koch put his complex, multi-genre music to words. Together, they have created unforgettable songs to honor one of the nations most important activists, and you can experience it live right at the intersection of Avenida Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.
“American history is cyclical. We revisit and repeat a lot of mistakes we made in the past,” Benavides says. “We approach the brink of feeling like we can’t go back, and somehow we do. And this opera is about a great moment in American history when leaders got together and said, ‘Enough, we’re gonna unite and find a cause to fight for.’ We still have issues of the most vulnerable in our society being preyed upon and being ostracized. And I think that there’s some similarities there and some places to find inspiration. But also, at the same time, I think the message of the opera isn’t that these heroes save us, it’s that they teach us how to save ourselves. They give people power that shows that, when we come together, we have the ability to change the world.”
Benavides says Dolores is a classical symphony and ensemble – complete with strings, brass, woodwinds and percussion – but he also threw in a saxophone and electric guitar to give the opera a bit of a modern feel at the same time. He says he wrote the music to be enjoyable and fun, but encourages audiences to explore their emotions at the deepest level.
“If you like watching people go through a crisis of faith on stage and come out on top, if you like underdog stories, if you like American history, if you like fighters, this is a great show for you. The singing is amazing, the orchestra is going to sound great, the set design brings you right back to 1968,” he says. “And it might be your only chance to see an opera that is going to be performed on the street of the person it’s named after: Avenida Dolores Huerta. And it’s an opera about Dolores written by a New Mexico-based, New Mexico-born composer about a new Mexican-born civil rights leader.”
Kelly Guerra, the first-generation Peruvian-American mezzo-soprano who will be singing as Dolores Huerta, has been performing regionally for the past 10 years and has a doctorate in music and voice from UC Santa Barbara. Her resume includes performances ranging from Opera Southwest to the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and the bulk of her work as an opera singer has been in Spanish. She says she’s always been very proud of being a Spanish speaker and Latina. And her mother – a single mom who works in immigration – is a really important part of her story.
“I would sit in the office with her a lot, and she had dozens of farm workers come into her office every day, working on their immigration papers. And so I saw the people I’m singing about while growing up,” Guerra says. “I grew up near Oxnard and Ventura where there are a lot of strawberry fields and other different fruits and vegetables being grown. Ainadamar is a piece in Spanish that I got to do with “The Met” – It was actually the first contemporary opera I ever did in school – and made me realize that I can sing in Spanish, and it’s not something I have to hide.”
Guerra says Huerta a feminist icon and the libretto and music conceptually balance “all the spinning plates that Dolores is in charge of.” Guerra describes a scene in which Huerta is having an argument with her mother on the phone. Huerta’s mother says, “The kids need this union.”
Guerra channels Huerta perfectly: “This is bigger than me. This is something to make their world a better place.
“She’s often fighting the need to be with her family and her kids, and being the only woman in the room and at these negotiation tables,” Guerra says. “And it’s been really inspiring to navigate all of those different spaces. She has to lead a movement, talk to a senator, make sure her friends are not going to kill each other in an argument over something very intense and also try to keep her sanity – keep her kids happy and safe and fed. So she was dealing with a lot. I will never understand how she had that kind of capacity. Of course, it took community power, but still, her perseverance is more than inspiring.”
Guerra says she’s been a part of this project since 2022, and the opera’s content was relevant then, of course. But during preparations for the summer premiere, stories about ICE raids began popping up on media outlets across the country and the world, and she found it very difficult to open up the score.
“There’s one line that Dolores says that always makes me choke up:
‘Farm workers are already dying, dying young, worked to the bone. They collapse in the fields …’
“That part always really, really gets me because I think of all the people I saw growing up, my mom telling me that her clients are getting deported, they’re afraid to leave their homes. And this opera is a wonderful lesson in perseverance – and unfortunately – how cyclical these things can be. So it’s both a history lesson and a war cry for right now, and I am so proud to be a part of it.”
Dolores
Oct. 29 – Nov. 2
7:30 p.m.
National Hispanic Cultural Center
1701 Fourth St. SW
$29-$109